Human video arcade game coming to Greeley on Friday

Lil' Missy is one of the characters in the real-life video arcade game, "Catchy." The game is one of three used by OhHeckYeah, a life-sized video arcade game that is portrayed on a giant LED screen. The game will come to Greeley's 9th Street Plaza as a part of Friday Fest from 5-10 p.m.

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The Denver resident will prove as much on Friday when he transforms Greeley’s 9th Street Plaza into a life-sized video game that uses real people as the players.

It’s all literally fun and games, but Corrigan’s aim is to bring strangers together and strengthen the health of communities through play time.

His gaming experiment, dubbed OhHeckYeah, debuted on the streets of Denver this summer to the delight of unknowing passersby. The games are displayed on LED screens on Champa Street, and anyone can play.

It’s not surprising that letting loose and forgetting about their worries — things that come inherently with play time — make people more creative and happy, Corrigan said. In the long term, that translates to growth in employment and job creation.

“Really, my interest is what makes a place successful,” he said in a phone interview. “It comes down to how people feel about whether or not they can achieve something.”

This will be the first time Corrigan’s games leave their home in Denver, where he said he was surprised to see lines of people waiting to play each time.

The game coming to Greeley is called “Catchy.” Players take on the persona of characters such as Cherry Chub, Roberto and Ma Ma Mouth and move around to try to catch good things displayed on the screen, like apples, coins and diamonds, while avoiding the bad stuff, like bombs, swords and dirty socks. All that players need is themselves.

Corrigan said he and the game makers considered a game in which players use their phones as controllers, but he said that could make the game less accessible, which is the opposite of his goal.

“I thought we would have a lot of hard-core gamers,” Corrigan said of when the games were first displayed. “But really, we have everyone,” from 4- to 60-year olds, he said.

Not only can anyone participate, but he said he likes the idea that video games are interactive stories, because it gives a grassroots twist to theater.

OhHeckYeah takes place in Denver’s theater district, so the games in a way are a new generation of theater, Corrigan said, with the players as the characters.

No matter their background, he said it has been intriguing to watch people playing the games because they almost immediately became more open to each other. That is important to him.

“People always say that technology is putting us into these bubbles,” Corrigan said. “It’s not the technology. It’s really the design of the technology.”